Hotwalker – Tom Russell

Outsider art commands bully pulpit "I’m a frustrated writer," Tom Russell confessed to me a couple years ago. He finally did something about it, using his bully pulpit as a singer-songwriter to explain to listeners about the country, blues, folk, jazz and gospel he was exposed to growing up in Los Angeles and later in New York and how outsiders, notably the poet Charles Bukowski and the circus performer and poet Little Jack Horton, influenced him and his music. Hotwalker is hardly an album in the traditional sense but rather a pastiche of spoken-word readings-including the voices of Russell, Horton, Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Harry Partch, the Reverend Baybie Hoover, Virginia Brown and Lenny Bruce-and atmospheric background music elegantly articulated by Russell’s guitarist sidekick Andrew Hardin, with a few songs sprinkled in between. From the background circus calliope accompanying Horton’s colorful pronouncements (his telling of Bukowski and him driving a locomotive engine is hilarious) to descriptions of Dave Van Ronk’s apartment by Sheridan Square to his primitive paintings that decorate the CD, Hotwalker digs deep into the spirit of Outsider Art as expressed on canvas, as poetry, in books or as a record.